e
stairs four stories below----"

"I only asked you who the woman was who came in with you, Jim----"

His fingers gripped her throat and stopped her breath. Through the roar
of surging blood she could barely hear the vile words he was dinning
into her ears.

"I know you just asked me, you nosing little devil, and it's none of
your business! She's a pal of mine, if you want to know, the slickest
thief that ever robbed a flat. She's got more sense in a minute than
you'll ever have in a lifetime. She's going to live here with me now.
You can sleep on the cot in the kitchen. And you come when she calls,
if you know what's good for your lazy hide. I've told her to thrash the
life out of you if you dare to give her any impudence."

She had cowered at his feet and begged him not to beat her again. The
fumes of whiskey and stale beer filled the place.

Jim turned from her to quell a new fight at the other end of the room.
Another woman was there, coarse, dirty, beastly. She drew a knife and
demanded her share of the night's robberies. She was trying to break
from the men who held her to stab Jim. They were all fighting and
smashing the furniture----

She sprang from the bed with a cry of horror. The noise was real! It was
not a dream. The beast inside was stumbling in the dark. His passions
fired by liquor, he was fumbling to find his way into her room.

She rushed to the door and put her shoulder against the bar, panting in
terror.

She heard his strangling cry:

"Here! Here! Great God! Do you know what you're doing?"

And then his mother's voice, mad with greed, cruel, merciless:

"I just want yer money--that's all, an' I'm goin' to have it!"

She heard the clinch in the struggle and the dull blow of the knife.
In a sudden flash she saw it all. He had succeeded in rousing Nance's
avarice and transforming her into a fiend. Without knowing it she was
stabbing her own son to death in the room in which he had been born!

She tried to scream and her lips refused to move. She tried to hurry to
the rescue and her knees turned to water.

Gasping for breath, she drew the bar from her prison door and walked
slowly into the room.

Nance's tall, bony figure was still crouched over the open bag, her
left hand buried in the gold, her right gripping the knife, her face
convulsed with greed--avarice and murder blended into perfect hell-lit
unity at last.

Jim lay on his back, limp and still, obliquely across the couch, hi